Obama's Chicken Little challenge

This time, President Barack Obama warns, the sky really is falling. Really.

His problem: The pitch isn’t a new one — not to a public weary of fiscal disaster countdown clocks and breathless deadlines, one that heard Obama’s predictions the fiscal cliff would be calamitous, his analysis that the sequester would hamstring the economy or his warning that a government shutdown could mean a recovery slowdown.

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Those predictions could still come to pass. But when the various strokes of midnight didn’t deliver the worst on those fronts, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief, and moved on.

Now, with a historic default looming, Obama’s doomsdaying is drawing a been-there, heard-that response from much of the country. More than a few Republican members are publicly skeptical of the risk of failure to raise the debt limit. Polls show a majority of Americans aren’t sold either. And the stock market continues to mostly shrug at the prospect of a default.

It isn’t entirely Obama’s fault. But his dramatic messaging, combined with the frequency of fiscal crises, has induced an advanced case of apocalypse fatigue. The whole country — including, to hear him tell it, Obama himself — is bone-weary of semi-annual brushes with financial calamity.

The result: Obama’s still talking. But he’s not breaking through.

To boost his case for a clean debt limit increase, Obama has invited the entire Congress to the White House and made public statements about the debt limit on six of the past seven days. But so far most Republicans aren’t eager to cooperate. And despite sagging poll numbers for the GOP, there seems to be little public pressure for them to bend.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed over the shutdown and countless more impacted because of the sequester cuts. Their plight has not yet moved Republicans to accede to Obama’s demand for a budget extension and debt limit increase without significant giveback of some kind.

And so the bottom line for Obama, two years after his first close encounter with default, remains the challenge of explaining to a skeptical public what breaching the debt limit means. He’s dubbed it an unprecedented “economic shutdown” and warned of all manner of calamity — telling a Florida TV station Wednesday, for instance, that “it’s never happened before. It’s completely unacceptable that’s even a prospect” — but hasn’t managed to persuade Congress to acquiesce to a clean debt ceiling increase.

Nor has there been much of a public wave demanding one.

“The challenge on the debt ceiling is frankly, people just don’t understand what it is,” said Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House. “And so it sounds scary and I think people are nervous about it, but it is one of those issues where both sides are talking in a D.C. language that doesn’t necessary translate beyond Washington, D.C.”

Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who helped pitch the White House sequester and shutdown messaging on cable TV, conceded Wednesday that several rounds of dire predictions may have made for a tougher sale this time around.

“The sequester was hard because it was very gradual and diffuse. My side oversold the immediate impact of the sequester,” Begala said. “I don’t just fault the president; I was part of that selling, too.”

“Does it hurt them now to have oversold the sequester and shutdown, sure,” said Jared Bernstein, a first-term economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, who adds that “there are people in the opposition who wouldn’t believe anything the White House said no matter how true it was.”

White House officials dispute that the president’s sequester and shutdown predictions have been overblown, pointing to the fact that Republicans offer bills almost daily to address the issues raised by Democrats — a National Institutes of Health funding bill, a measure restoring death benefits for military families and a proposal authorizing retroactive pay for furloughed federal employees, among others.

The White House also isn’t worried that the president’s default predictions are too dire, in part because so many others are making the same claims. Officials truly believe it would be disastrous, and suggestions that it wouldn’t be so bad elicit shocked looks Wednesday.

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Wednesday warned that defaulting on the nation’s debt could throw the country back into an economic recession like the one Obama inherited from George W. Bush.

“The consequences are unknowable and one of those consequences could be recession,” Carney said. “All we know is it would be bad. All we know is the full faith and credit of the United States would be in doubt.”

But it’s that great unknown that represents a big chunk of the president’s problem. Aside from scary predictions, the White House has had trouble articulating exactly what a debt default would mean — in part because it is so complicated. Obama has made a series of tortured analogies to credit cards, mortgages and student loans, but none have stuck.

Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was more blunt during an Organizing for Action conference call Wednesday night. After a federal government default, Goolsbee said, “most of the large banks and financial institutions of the country would be insolvent,” the subsequent economic meltdown would “destroy the world” and instigate an immediate recession.